"Ping An Batch" creation talk: Smell the smell of good rice from the rice jar

one

Time is of the essence, not a day less. However, the time is not average, and after enough time, the inflection point will suddenly appear. Most of my works have a long history of growth. Even a short story is often put in the heart for a long time, seemingly forgotten, seemingly no way out, one day accidentally remembered, suddenly can be written down. At first I thought I was an inert person who believed I had severe procrastination, but then I realized that this might be the right way to produce a work: by time screening, by time.

Ping An Approval by Chen Jiming, Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House

Since ancient times, my hometown of Tianshui, Gansu, there has been a habit of "taking the west entrance", and the destination is "outside the mouth". Outside the mouth is Xinjiang. The two are thousands of miles apart, in the middle of which to cross the great desert, the Great Gobi, many areas are uninhabited and aquatic grass, and more wind and sand, half of the people often die on the road. After finally arriving there, some people no longer dared to expect to return to the same way in their lifetime, so they rebuilt a hometown in the distance, bringing the names of the mountains, rivers, ditches, and roads of their hometown with them. A small group of people, on the other hand, left first unswervingly and then returned more steadfastly. Of course, some others died on the way back. If someone comes back from "outside the mouth", he does not have to listen to him talk more, and he knows that he is coming back from a long way, and there is openness and tenderness in the cold eyes, and his speech is occasionally exaggerated and occasionally humble. A person who meets every day suddenly disappears, and it turns out to be "gone". Go, this word has a very definite meaning, as soon as you hear it, you will know that if you go out of the mouth, you may never see it. Half of the letters and remittance slips sent by the postmen came from Xinjiang. It has always been said that the large landlord Chen Zifen did not die, but the golden cicada shed its shell and walked out of the mouth, and some people saw it with their own eyes on the streets of Urumqi. Chen Zifen and my family are in the same vein. Our ancestors were two brothers, and after the separation of the family, according to the orientation of their respective residences, they were called the front head and the back head. The front is gradually declining, and the back is thriving. There were many figures in the back, including graduates of Peking University, provincial councilors, some people who died under Yang Hucheng's knife, a father and son who were also county chiefs, sons whose county chiefs were bought at money, some who were secretaries of Ji Hongchang, and some who participated in the Penghu Reform Law. The latter's name was Chen Xiehua, and he was one of the six people who signed Gansu in response to the change. In short, in my childhood and adolescence imagination, the word "outside the mouth" is steaming and the sky is high, and it is an "external world" that really exists since I was born. If I imagine two external worlds in my childhood, one is called "Beijing" and the other is called "Xinjiang". Xinjiang is more itchy with me. After I started studying to write, I realized that, for me, Xinjiang was a book hanging in my imagination in my literary world. I don't know what day I wanted to take the book out of the air and write it on the manuscript paper, but I never got it. Once I came across a documentary on the animal world, and I knew that some animals would also travel long distances, through all kinds of difficulties and dangers, and insisted on returning to the "homeland". When the animals finally set foot on their homeland, their appearance immediately changed, and they looked comfortable and at ease, as if they had regained their lost dignity. As the saying goes, the golden nest and the silver nest are not as good as their own earth nests. It's probably about dignity. There is at least dignity in their own nests. However, the so-called "homeland is inseparable" is obviously not unique to people, but it is just a biological instinct. This thought unconsciously dissolved my desire to write. For many years afterwards I stopped trying to take the book that hung in the air.

Around the age of forty, the state had a policy of relocation, which moved farmers from poor areas to places with abundant water and grass. The government has built houses in new places, and there are still some financial subsidies, it is still difficult to impress them, and many people are resolute and refuse to leave. In the eyes of outsiders, they are incomprehensible and stupid, but the parties have their reasons, and some of them can be said to be that they cannot take the landscape and water with the bones of their ancestors. I feel the same way myself and often can't comment. If it were my own family, I probably wouldn't have gladly gone.

This reminds me of that book, and I think that the complex relationship between man and the homeland may be hidden in the deep secrets of human nature, and it is not simply possible to put on the hat of "inferior" and "backward" for them. In addition, there may be essential differences in literature and sociology, ethics, and political science, and the two will diverge at a certain key point, and what is backward in sociology is not necessarily different in literature. For example, people's yearning for pastoral life, attachment to agricultural civilization, people's homeland is inseparable and the falling leaves are rooted in the complex, if they are expressed in literature, they cannot simply be called obsolete and old-fashioned. Human nature from a literary perspective is a complete and complete humanity, and the two cannot be separated for a moment. The most fundamental interest in literature is human nature. Human nature cannot be divided into high and low. Who is closer to literature among the immigrant population of the United States and the natives of the United States? Who is closer to literature than the man who drives the plane or the man who drives the donkey cart? President and beggar who approach literature? These questions are not easy to answer, but they are also easy to answer.

After a few more years, I taught at the Northern University for Nationalities. There is a professor Lin Tao who studies Dungan literature. The Dungan people, in some periods of the Qing Dynasty, for various reasons, the Shaanxi people who were exiled to the present-day Central Asian countries, the Gansu people, the Xinjiang people, over time, gradually formed a new nation in another country. More than a hundred years later, they still speak Shaanxi dialect Gansu dialect, completely retain the customs and customs of their hometown, like to eat pasta, still eat with chopsticks, and the food also retains its original name, such as lotus white, cucumber, cold powder, brine noodles, noodles, steamed buns, etc. Dungan, one of the explanations is the transliteration of the Shaanxi dialect "East Bank Zi". The east bank, that is, the east bank, the east bank of the Yellow River. When someone asked where they were from, they pointed to the far east and said, "We are the people of the east coast." "The transliteration of the east bank is The Dungan. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic identification carried out this group of people as "Dungan". Dungan people have always stressed to the outside world: "Our roots are in China." They also often call themselves "Central Plains people." In China, there is gradually "Dungan studies", and many scholars study the history, culture, language and literature of Dungan. Professor Lin invited me to follow him in the study of Dungan literature, and I was not very interested in research, but I was exposed to a lot of Dungan literature.

It is conceivable that in a foreign country, out of self-preservation and the unforgettable nature of their homeland, the Dungan people are united and struggling to survive, and how they regard the demise of the memory of their homeland as a disgrace. After a few generations, there are always some old people among them, still talking about the people and things in their homeland and hometown, and young people, newly born people, still know that they come from China. For me, the whole imagination of the Dungan people is literature, part of a book.

A few years later, I was transferred to Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, and I saw dozens of "overseas Chinese batches" in a friend's tea house in Zhuhai, all of which were sent back from Singapore, and the sender was the collector's grandfather, and the recipient was the grandmother. At that time, the term "overseas Chinese criticism" was not known. Collectors themselves are also called "letters", not batches, batches, or overseas Chinese batches. I flipped through it and realized that this was another version of the story of the mouth and the Story of Dungan. Because it is separated by the sea, it may be more typical.

The inflection point came in October 2019, and I was appointed by the Propaganda Department of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee and the Guangdong Writers Association to go to the Propaganda Department of the Shantou Municipal Party Committee as a deputy director for one year, precisely to write a novel about overseas Chinese criticism. All the hesitations and preparations for the previous "West Exit", about Dungan, and about my own family have become important resources for the Ping An Batch. After just a few months of extensive reading and painstaking brewing, I held the attitude of knowing that there were tigers in the mountains and biased towards the tiger mountain line, and I wrote it in advance. I told myself that I didn't have to turn myself into Chaoshan Tong before I wrote Chaoshan.

two

Before writing, I had a few requirements for myself:

Let the language be simple, peaceful and calm, there must be at least two smells in the language, one is the classic smell of Chinese characters and Chinese, Chinese characters and Chinese, there is a long and broad Chinese cultural tradition, then, this also means that I have to take the initiative to meet a challenge, can I bring cultural traditions naturally into it? Can you write about the fundamental characteristics of Chinese civilization? The second is the local smell and folk atmosphere that can be smelled from the Chaoshan land and the literature, just like the smell of good rice produced in the Chaoshan land from the rice tank. Throughout the writing process, I tried to grasp both of these smells.

Write a novel that is generally plain and full, with a temperament and intentional implications. In other words, throw away the "habits" of the past as much as possible. It was also at the stage when I was preparing to write "Ping An Pi" that I realized that writers may have a common "habit". Writers are accustomed to returning to the "deep self" as soon as they mention the pen, accustomed to expressing things such as "freedom", "nothingness", "loneliness", "drifting feeling", "rootlessness", etc., which have been fashionable for a long time, but they may have long become literary fashion and literary rhetoric. I thought, this time I don't pretend to be sophisticated, or even ambitious, just plain. The euphemism, brightness and profundity in plainness require great effort, and it is often difficult for outsiders to be humane.

The novel takes place in a long time and an open space, but I don't intend to write too long, I don't intend to write a panoramic novel, so the structure is important. I couldn't find the structure for a long time, and then I came across an industrial structure, a distributed structure. Its main feature is that there is a host and several extensions, and the extension may be connected to the host with a line away from the host. Therefore, I borrowed it - the host of this novel is Zheng Mengmei of the overseas Chinese batch or the opening of the batch bureau, the extension is Zheng Mengmei's family affairs and personal situation, the women in Zheng Mengmei's family, Zheng Mengmei's father and son during the War of Resistance, the elderly Zheng Mengmei, who was translated by Dong Girl to the United States and then translated back as the "Yiyun family's batch" of Chinese, and so on. It was my first attempt to write with this structure. Structure in the novel is not a purely material zombie thing, it is also speaking. It even has to say more, speaking in place of the writer. Modern fiction requires structure more than traditional fiction. In traditional fiction, it is mainly the writer who speaks. In the modern novel, the different structures are the dialogue relationship, or the intertextual relationship. No particular paragraph is sufficient to be relied upon as a basis for interpreting the novel alone.

Go back to common sense, trust the characters, and write good characters. In addition to writing good men, we must also write good women. During the months of Chaoshan's deep life, I repeatedly realized that Chaoshan women were ignored or distorted to a considerable extent. When people praise Chaoshan women in a habitual tone, I think any compliment is frivolous. When people criticize them, I can't accept it either. So I wanted to put them in a book and see why I had such complicated and indescribable feelings. I also firmly believe that looking at the civilized nature of a world through women is a trustworthy perspective. In this novel, the protagonists are men, ostensibly mainly men, but behind them, their grandmothers, mothers, wives, daughters are indispensable, and they are even the secret heart of the novel. At one end of the overseas chinese are men who are far abroad, and at the other end are women in the family, who have long been ignored and simplified as the party who runs the family and waits. As a group, they are unique in the world, and they have obvious cultural significance. My confidence and determination contributed to the image of a group of women in the book. Lao Zu, Wangzhi, Nai Hao, Zheng Huang, Zheng Bai these characters unconsciously flowed out of the pen and grew up on their own.

Jump out of Chaoshan to see Chaoshan and write Chaoshan stories as Chinese stories, or even as human stories. The propositions of migration, displacement, survival, flight, land, return, cultural identity, are indeed not unique to Chinese, but they are indeed more intense, more extreme, and more meaningful in Chinese. Thoreau said: "The edge is not where the world ends, it is precisely where the world articulates itself." This phrase has always been my motto.

I also think that this book should form a dialogue with the times themselves. This is a novel written about a specific period of history, but it is completed in the present era, and it should have a profound dialogue with this era. The two foreigners in the book, George and Aunt Dong, appear under this concept.

three

I have always been opposed to novels expressing a single theme. I thought that the theme did not exist until the end of the novel. Novelists use novels to find and explore themes. It wasn't until I was about to finish the book that I realized that I had found the subject, but I still couldn't tell. Another important task of the novel is to be fascinating and curious. Doing everything possible to make a novel fascinating and curious is always a difficult task for a novelist.